Added to this are the many mechanical considerations facing an animator that make “hitting the mark�? seem like and instruction to “touch your finger to your nose.�? With timing charts and layouts and an established vocal track somewhere sincerity and honesty and emotional life find their way onto the page one drawing at a time. A live actor can dive into the action of a scene and charge ahead as the character takes over with each syllable spoken. But the technical requirements are a constant reminder for the animator who must develop a second awareness of the real time in which a scene takes place. Add to this the idea that on a live action film shoot you can frequently have several cameras at once so that a director can select from a number of ways the same scene was framed or shot and cut those together. In animation, every time the point of view changes or there’s a cut this is a new scene for an animator. And that may be just two seconds or 48 drawings in spite of the recorded dialogue accompanying it. The animator must establish everything required to capture your attention and make you believe in what you see and forget that you’re watching drawings and shots cut together to create a scene.

It can be exhausting and mind numbing. Almost from the start is the unseen partner in this process: the voice actor performing the dialogue of the character. The vocal performance is a gift to the animator that can either inspire or create a hurdle. Vocal performances handed over to animators are like taking a pomegranate and passing it to a master chef. The better the pomegranate and the better the chef, the better the resulting dish. Let’s run with this idea for a moment. The chef peels away at the pomegranate layer by layer and adds each tiny seed into the recipe just as the character that the animator creates is done one drawing at a time. The more the chef embraces the complexity of the fruit itself, the more seeds he can extract and use. A pomegranate alone is just a pomegranate (yes, I know, thank you Gertrude Stein) but a master chef given the pick of the crop takes each seed and makes it a jewel in a salad that awakens every taste bud in your mouth when the final result is served up. So when a master animator takes a vocal performance and turns it into more than just a recorded performance, the end result is what you hear actors talking about when they say how they had no idea how much could be gleaned from their recording until they saw it come to life on screen. Like the master chef who opens the pomegranate up and turns it into something greater than what it was before it was plucked from the tree, so great personality or character animators give back to the source by elevating a recorded performance beyond what it was in the studio. This, in part, is why I’ve always held that celebrated actors make better voice artists than “personalities�? or “celebrities.�?

Alright, as if I haven’t tossed this salad enough, let’s add one last consideration - almost no modern animator working on a feature film is single handedly responsible for every frame of every scene of a character. There is a team. The more footage or screen time a character has, usually the larger the team. And I point this out because I am focusing in this series on master performances and the directing or supervising animator we associate with that performance. Therefore, it’s critical for me to underscore how the supervising or directing animator has a profound influence on establishing every scene in which the character appears. This happens through the final model that they create in partnership with a character designer, their own personal animation of the meat of the character in critical scenes or production numbers, and the guidance they give and style they establish for others to follow. This latter part often comes by drawing extreme poses in many if not most other scenes animated by assistants. The supervising animator determines personality through the interpretation of specific postures, gestures, flashes of temper and subtle shifts behind the eyes. It can not be underestimated or overstated how the supervising animator defines the soul of a character - and how they translate all the emotion of the storyboards and the voice performance into a line drawing that is both simple enough to convey the soul of a character to the audience in dialogue as well as pantomime and detailed enough to make for an emotionally complex and compelling character that you accept as real. It is all this work that acts as the springboard for this series of essays.

DEFINING THE GREAT PERFORMANCE
or
Suddenly the Unexpected
The last thing to discuss before we dive in is what makes a particular work of supervising animation a great performance. Most of us have a personal favorite actor or actress and a favorite film that they’ve done. As I sat down to outline this assignment I quickly discovered that I was listing personal favorites, and I stopped to take a second look. I wanted to dig a little deeper to define a master-performance or “great performance.�? So I tried to think through some of the beliefs that I have about all remarkable performing artists. I believe that master actors have a pair of performances that work something like this: they first come to prominence via an establishing role that puts them on the radar screen, followed by a performance that garners wider critical praise, perhaps even an award and certainly more bankability and a strong base from which to negotiate future work in their field. To use the example of live actors you can think of Tom Hanks in “Splash�? later followed by “Forrest Gump�? or Merryl Streep in “Kramer vs. Kramer�? later followed by “Sophie’s Choice.�? Of course the most accomplished talent continues to turn in great performances that we always look forward to seeing, but critics and fans and historians alike inevitably point back to that career making critical stunner when referencing a career. An analogy in animation would be Glen Keane’s turn as the Bear in “The Fox & the Hound�? followed a few years later by the Beast in “Beauty & the Beast.�?

Occasionally I find that career making role to be the finest work of a performer, but when I took the time to really think about it I discovered that more often than not, for me, the master performance is a later career performance. It’s a work that can come mid-career and be atypical of previous performances - either through technical achievement or a total reversal of “type�? and most often a combination of the two - but goes beyond that. It’s a performance that seems effortless and draws less attention to itself. It’s the perfect performance within an ensemble, so believable and so honest that you forget the animator and see only the character. I’m looking to zero in on those performances. Sometimes they are my favorites characters and sometimes they aren’t, but what they always are is animation that makes me shake my head and say “wow, she just keeps getting better and better�? and sticks with me and makes me laugh and cry every single time I see the film, as if discovering it for the first time no matter how often I’ve seen it.

My thanks to the friends, colleagues and other professionals who have contributed to this series and so generously agreed to let me keep bugging them as the year goes on. Chief among them Don Hahn, Ron Clements, Eric Goldberg, Ollie Johnston, Dean DeBlois, Jim Pentecost, Ken Duncan, Lorna Cook, Andreas Deja and Tom Sito. And thanks too, to the encouragement and support of my friend, colleague and role model John Canemaker who when I first started talking about acting and animators very wisely and very generously said to me “you should write this down!�?

So, that said, along with my undying thanks for enduring this introduction, let’s get started!